A boat carrying tourists floats above an area called the Coral Gardens near Lady Elliot Island off the coast of Queensland on June 10.
Photograph: David Gray/REUTERS

Greg Hunt, the federal environment minister, has said a UN decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as in danger shows that Australia is a “role model to the world” in environmental protection.

On Wednesday, the 21 nations on Unesco’s world heritage committee unanimously endorsed an earlier draft ruling that the reef stay off the in-danger list, although Australia must report back on its recovery plans by December next year.

Several nations praised Australia’s efforts to aid the ailing reef, which is the world’s largest living structure but has lost around half of its coral cover in the past 30 years.

Between them, the Australian and Queensland governments have pledged to ban the dumping of dredged seabed sediment within the reef’s world heritage area and to limit the expansion of ports along the coast.

The federal government has put $140m towards a reef trust to improve water quality, with a target of slashing the amount of nitrogen flowing onto coral by 80% over the next decade.

The government’s scientists have warned that the reef is in poor and deteriorating condition, with climate change the leading long-term threat to the vast coral ecosystem. Pollution flowing from land, cyclones and a plague of coral-eating starfish are also degrading the reef system, which is roughly the size of Italy and supports more than 1,600 species of fish.

Hunt, who attended the world heritage committee gathering in Germany, said the decision was “tremendous” and that the committee felt that Australia was a “role model to the world” in how to protect coral reefs.

“It’s really an astonishing and outstanding outcome for Australia and what it means is that the physical work is now being held up to the rest of the world for dealing with complex challenges facing the great coral reefs of the globe,” Hunt told the ABC.

Hunt said the reef decision, along with the world heritage committee’s far more critical appraisal of the management of Tasmania’s wilderness area, was a “really outstanding set of outcomes for Australia and for Australia to be held up before the world and by the world as a role model I think is a good day for Australia’s environmental reputation”.

The environment minister, who led a vigorous diplomatic lobbying effort to avoid an adverse listing following concerns raised by Unesco last year, said some green groups had campaigned with “spectacular lack of success” for the reef to be listed in danger.

Greenpeace told delegates in Bonn that Australia’s continued support for new coal mines in Queensland meant that there would be “more dredging, thousands more coal ships through the reef and a dangerous amount of new coal being burnt.”

Conservation groups have attempted to bring international attention to the difficulties faced by the reef. Greenpeace funded advertisements on London’s Underground network telling commuters that this is their “last chance to visit” the reef.

Michael Roche, the chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, said such campaigns had been “great money spinners for groups like Greenpeace and WWF.”

“The ‘in danger’ decision promoted by Greenpeace would have been a travesty and would have signified that activists could hold sovereign nations like Australia to ransom, subjecting large parts of our economy to enormous economic and reputational risk,” Roche said.

Several huge coal projects in Queensland could benefit from the world heritage committee’s decision. The largest project, the $16.5bn Adani-run Carmichael mine, is seeking finance but has had 11 overseas banks publicly refuse to back it. Potential investors with environmental concerns may, however, be reassured by the lack of an in-danger listing for the reef.

The chief executive of WWF Australia, Dermot O’Gorman, said the decision had put Australia on probation and made clear that “promises alone will not be enough. The world heritage committee wants hard evidence that Australia is delivering outcomes in coming years.”

WWF, which has said it did not want an in-danger listing, has been critical of the level of government funding allocated to tackling water pollution and has called on Australia to do more to combat climate change, the leading threat to the reef.

Prof Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC centre of excellence for coral studies at James Cook University, said there was pressure on the Australian government to implement its 2050 protection plan for the reef.

“The world heritage committee’s decision was strongly influenced by breakthroughs in just the past few weeks to curb the number of ports along the Queensland coast, and especially to ban dumping at sea of capital dredge spoil,” he said.

“The elephant in the room is still the Galilee coal basin, and the inevitable damage it will cause to the world heritage area if its development proceeds. The 2050 plan is largely silent on climate change, even though the bommonwealth’s own Great Barrier Reef report card has identified climate change as the single largest threat to the reef.”